My date was successful in every way except in the way that engenders new dates. At the very end of the evening, around 1 AM or so, when we were alone together, he told me, we couldn't possibly date because of the distance, but if I wanted to hook up, you know, of course that would be fine. And I said no, I wouldn't be doing that, and I left.

I had a very fun time though, and I felt things. And the guy was super attractive to me and I think this helps me isolate some more of the traits I'm looking for in a person.

Some people who you'd definitely tag as being "on my side" (moms and friends) think that the dude could've been more careful with my feelings. If he knew he didn't want to date me because I lived in VA, he knew that before I ever came up for the weekend. And it is accurate to note that the dude is the one who pushed some escalation of the expectations of the date; he's the one that asked to call me on Thursday (and we spent 40 minutes speaking). He's the one who kind of kept bringing up relationship expectations when we hung out.

I think that's ok. I think people can be confused. I was willing to see how things could be. It turns out he doesn't have family near me like I thought, so that's a factor that changed over the course of us hanging out (just because I'd made a wrong supposition). I do have to admit this isn't the first time a guy has had me at his place at 1 AM after several, several hours of hanging out -- to only tell me then that he's unavailable for some reason. (This is the second.) I don't know.

I got to get fabulously dressed up, I even painted my toenails, and I looked amazing. I'm confident that as a date/weekend, I freakin' killed it. So, although rejected, I left the weekend really appreciative of 95% of the experience. Kahneman says that we have bad memories, and we will judge an entire experience based on the last 5 seconds or minutes of it. If that little bit of time is negative, we'll perceive the whole thing negatively, even if most of it was positive. I'm not going to do that with my weekend. I enjoyed a heck of a lot of it. :)

And then I ran 9.32 miles on Monday because fuck it, if I get rejected, I'm going to go out there and get me a win. (PS. Wasn't it a mutual rejection anyway? He rejected dating me, while I rejected having sex with him.)

Musings from adulthood ---